


I hold out for the thaw

by handfuloftime



Category: Lady Franklin of Russell Square - Erika Behrisch Elce, The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Epistolary, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:54:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25205791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handfuloftime/pseuds/handfuloftime
Summary: Lady Franklin writes one more letter to her husband.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	I hold out for the thaw

**Author's Note:**

> For The Terror Decameron prompt "bittersweet". Originally posted on [tumblr](https://handfuloftime.tumblr.com/post/615861972277264384/i-hold-out-for-the-thaw-lady-franklin-writes-one).

**Editor's Note:** This letter was recently discovered at the back of Sophia Cracroft's journal for 30 March to 19 June 1874 (Scott Polar Research Institute, MS 248/347). It appears to be a letter from Jane, Lady Franklin, to her husband, Sir John Franklin. The letter is in Lady Franklin’s handwriting and is dated September 1859–more than fourteen years after her husband departed on his last, fatal expedition. It has been suggested that this letter is a missing part of the collection of Lady Franklin’s letters to Sir John from May 1847 onwards, which was unearthed in 2014 and is now in private hands–though it should be noted that the last letter in that collection dates from over two years before this one. A note at the top of the letter, in a hand identified as Sophia Cracroft’s, reads “For Burning”. Why this directive was overlooked–and how the letter came to be preserved among Sophia Cracroft’s papers–is unknown.

* * *

_22 September 1859_

My dearest love,

I have had longer to grow accustomed to your silence than you to mine. Well, now both are broken. Steadfast Captain McClintock has returned, and brought with him news at last. I can hardly call it good news, and yet I can call it nothing else. I have long since grown used to men killing you: Sir James Ross and the odious Dr. Rae with their Esquimaux rumours, Richard King with his Cassandra predictions, Sir James Graham with his balance sheet. Now Captain McClintock delivers the gentlest blow of them all.

My love, you have been dead for more than twelve years. Since June the 11th, 1847. I look back through my letters to you, and see that I wrote to you the day before. How long ago that letter seems: a younger Jane, with her embarrassed talk of travel diaries and her earnest anticipation of your triumphant homecoming. Were our lives a work of fiction, the irony would be unspeakable.

I find that I am relieved. Is that so very wicked? The endless, hopeless waiting is finished at last. You are dead, and I have mourned you. I need not wail and tear my hair: these ten long years have been my public lamentation. And whatever the truth of Dr. Rae’s tales–tho’ even now I can hardly grant there is any–they can no longer stain you. The world will be given the proper story.

Thomas drove me over to Russell Square, once Captain McClintock had left. It was a fine afternoon, with the smell of the mock orange in the air. A nod to the Duke–on his carved face a look of disapproval, for my long absence, or perhaps only for the pigeons perched on his shoulders. And I paused at the garden gate and found I could not go in.

The last of the summer flowers have not yet withered: I could see them from the other side of the railing, the rosemary and the bleeding heart and the bright glorious campion. It has always been my garden–was my garden long before I ever met you–and yet I stood there and could think of nothing but you. You were there in the flowers: every stem that Mr. Rowe silently picked for me, the roses of my widowhood. When I wrote to you last, I told you that there was nowhere in London that did not remind me of you. Could you not leave me this?

So I got back into the carriage, and drove home. I did not see Mr. Rowe. I hardly know what I should have said if I had.

Captain McClintock’s news will be all over the _Times_ tomorrow, as if they had not already declared you dead two dozen times over and deplored even this last desperate attempt. And then the letters will begin to arrive. My grief is public property, after all. England must have her Penelope. The mask is a heavy one, but well fitted to my face by now.

This is not the goodbye I wrote to you two years ago, weary and railing against the cage I had fashioned for myself. The door is open now, and I may step out when I choose. When the new year comes, Sophy and I intend to visit America. And from there–who knows? ‘T is not too late to seek a newer world. One day I will come back to Russell Square and find it a place of peace again. But for now, there will be other gardens.

_Your Jane_

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Winter When He Goes" by Tracy Grammer.
> 
> “’T is not too late to seek a newer world” is from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”.


End file.
